。 💭 + what drove orchimaru to sasuke? i feel the fandom always mixes it up a lot for various reasons they have the backing for, and then their are others who spin it differently various headcanons. we know he wanted the power sasuke had in his body & couldn't get it from itachi, so he targeted sasuke, and baited him with power to kill his brother. could it be he also wanted to kill itachi too? to get what he wanted? i know this varies from your orochimaru to a degree, but i'm curious about yours ━━ @heroicstm .
Orochimaru mainly wanted a body with a sharingan. That was the whole thing ━━━━━━━ he tried to get Itachi, but Itachi didn't give him a chance, and Orochimaru probably already had an inkling about Itachi's illness. But why? Why a sharingan? Well, he wasn't the first one to link a sharingan to immortality ( most people in the fandom don't consider movies to be canon, but I do, and so I am going to talk about it ) in Inheritors of the Will of Fire, the main villain is called Hiruko ━━━━━━ Hiruko was friends with the sannin as a child, but unlike them, he lacked the potential to be a strong shinobi, he wasn't a prodigy like them, and so he began to develop a jutsu called "Chimera no Jutsu". Essentially he would be able to absorb and utilize other people's kekkei-genkai. Obviously, he was found out and chased out of the village by the sannin, still allegedly after years of research Hiruko figured out that to become immortal he needed to absorb five kekkei-genkai, and the fifth had to be a sharingan. The Sharingan he chose was Kakashi's, for the reason that Kakashi had managed to control it. That is the plot of the movie, now take a look at Orochimaru. Doesn't that sound similar?
In my opinion, Orochimaru targeting the Uchiha in special, had to do with the side effects Kakashi experiences when using the Sharingan. Since he was thinking about a permanent body, he wouldn't chose something that would cause him problems in the future. His targeting Sasuke proved effective because he could use Sasuke's hatred for Itachi to his benefit ( obviously here we diverge from my portrayal as Orochimaru later begins to see Sasuke as a son ), that is once he helps Sasuke kill Itachi, he could implant Itachi's eyes on Sasuke and then get not only Sasuke and all the benefits that come with him, but also the eternal mangekyo. His goal with Sasuke was never the body per say, but what they body could get him ━━━━━━━━━ the assimilation of the sharingan, if not for that he could have chosen literally anyone else. There were so many other shinobi whose bodies were more powerful than Sasuke and Itachi's ━━━━━━ he could have gone for Neji, Kakashi, Hidan, and so many others he encountered. It is worth mentioning here, that his first permanent vessel was supposed to be Kimimaro ━━━━━━━━━━━━ the only reason the plan switched was because Kimimaro had an unknown disease that couldn't be cured ( probably something to do with the kid being idk 70% alien ?? ).
Sasuke was a plan B, nothing more.